Noe Iniguez, 36, of Los Angeles was sentenced Monday to one year in jail and 36 months of probation and will be required to attend domestic violence counseling for violating both the state’s revenge porn statute and two restraining orders.

The facts of this case are horrendous, and illustrate the need for such a statute.

As I have written here before, we have successfully sued for this sort of conduct, but this law adds another means to help victims of revenge porn.

The “revenge porn” statute is contained in California Penal Code section 647. The statute is quite extensive, and contains a number of provisions. The “revenge porn” section of the code, as that term is usually meant, is contained in sub part 4(A). Basically, the statute requires a tacit approval between the parties that any intimate photos will remain private. Interestingly, that section states that “any person who photographs or records by any means the image of the intimate body part or parts of another identifiable person” is liable under this Penal Code.

I already see a problematic loophole. In the photo above, we see a woman taking a selfie. If she then sends that photo to her boyfriend, and after they break up he posts the photo, would it still be covered under this section? After all, the boyfriend is not the person who “photographed or recorded” the intimate body parts.

A San Francisco court ruled last week that Google has the right to arrange its search results as it pleases, which confirms the company’s long-held view, while underscoring the stark difference in how U.S. and European seek to regulate the search giant.

The number of callers have gone down as the defamed public becomes more educated on the topic, but I still get a lot of calls from potential clients wanting to sue Google for the information reported in its search results.

I always viewed this as wanting to sue the telephone company because it listed the phone number of a con artist in the phone book. Just as the phone book simply lists the names and telephone numbers of people with telephones, Google results are just a report of what is out on the internet. Google, quite appropriately in my opinion, has always argued that its search results are neutral, and it cannot be responsible for whatever its search spiders happen to find.

With that said, the frustration of defamation victims is understandable. The squib that Google creates in conjunction with the search results can often be more damning than the defamatory posting itself, because of the truncated nature.

It this recent challenge to Google, the plaintiff added a slight twist. CoastNews was miffed that it was ranked high on Bing and Yahoo, but that Google was pushing it far down the search results because it perceived CoastNews as a competitor. It sued, claiming that Google was being unfair, and should not be able to determine the position of websites returned in the search results.

The largest defamation verdict in Indiana history — more than $14.5 million awarded to a contractor who claimed State Farm Fire & Casualty ruined his business and reputation — has been upheld by the Indiana Court of Appeals.

In a decision issued Tuesday, the three-judge panel found Hamilton Superior Court Judge Steven R. Nation correctly denied the insurance giant’s request for a new trial based on a claim that roofing contractor Joseph Radcliff obtained the judgment through fraud on the court.

The case grew out of a 2006 storm that battered Central Indiana with golf-ball-size hail and ravaged thousands of homes. The damage tally topped $1 billion, with State Farm alone paying out more than $200 million on about 50,000 damage claims.

The payout to Radcliff, however, was not the result of damage to homes or cars — but for what a Hamilton County jury determined was damage State Farm did to the roofing contractor’s reputation.

These cases are becoming so commonplace, I’ve taken to calling them the “second appeal”. Here’s the way they work.

The defendant loses in the trial court, then they lose on appeal, so they bring their own action or motion back in the trial court, claiming the original verdict was achieved by a “fraud on the court”, usually based on some evidence the defendant claims would have resulted in a different result.

There is support for such case, but the circumstances for a successful fraud on the court claim are extremely narrow. Here, the insurance company claimed that after the trial, it obtained a declaration from a witness who said the plaintiff had lied and withheld evidence. That approach won’t fly. Courts want finality to their verdicts, and that is evidence that could have been presented in the original trial. A defendant does not get to call a “Mulligan” because it failed to vigorously defend the case the first time around.

In one of my cases, a plaintiff sued my client and we counter-sued. In the end, we obtained a large judgment, and just as in this case, the plaintiff appealed and lost. The plaintiff then brought an action for fraud on the court, claiming the entire matter had been covered by an arbitration agreement, and that we had “defrauded” the court by allowing it to enter a judgement, knowing the matter was subject to arbitration. You read right. The plaintiff brought the action under an agreement that contained an arbitration clause, and then claimed that we had defrauded the court by not invoking the arbitration requirement. The case was thrown out on demurrer.

Broadcaster Glenn Beck, formerly of Fox News, was nonetheless suspicious of Alharbi. He thought the Obama administration was hiding Alharbi’s involvement. So three weeks later, Beck urged the government to release its information on Alharbi or else Beck would “expose” him.

“While the media continues to look at what the causes were [behind] these two guys, there are, at this hour, three people involved,” Beck said, alleging the U.S. government had “tagged” Alharbi as a “proven terrorist.” Over several broadcasts, Beck called Alharbi the “money man” behind the Boston bombings. “You know who the Saudi is?” Beck asked. “He’s the money man. He’s the guy who paid for it.”

What Beck said about Alharbi was untrue. Alharbi sued Beck for defamation in federal court in late March. And now, in a batch of little-noticed motions, Beck has lashed back, saying Alharbi is trying to “punish” and impede Beck’s First Amendment rights. Beck argues the bombings made Alharbi a “limited purpose” and “involuntary” public figure who must prove not just that Beck made false accusations, but that Beck did it with “actual malice.”

Beck sticks to his guns that the man suing him for defamation had acted “suspiciously.”

This appears to the the classic, “I talked about you and made you a public figure, and now that you are a public figure, you have to show what I said about you was said with malice.” I’ll monitor this one and let you know how it is decided.

Clients often call and say, “can this person sue me for defamation if I [fill in the blank].” As I always say, and as this case illustrates, anyone can sue anybody for anything. The question is, can they do so successfully? Here, a sleeping baseball fan by the name of Andrew Rector is suing for the comments made by the sportscasters when the camera captured him napping.

Can he sue for defamation? Yes. But will he be successful? The answer here will be, no. A ridiculous and frivolous suit.

[UPDATE:] My prediction was correct. As reported by the New York Daily News, the court threw out (or should I say, put to sleep?) Rector’s ridiculous legal action.

Here is the video of the incident in question, which resulted in the unsuccessful legal action:

Pizza restaurant owners in America have been bombarded with letters threatening them with bad online publicity including bad reviews on sites such as Yelp, as well as physical damage such as food contamination — and demanding payment in Bitcoin, according to a report by veteran security blogger Brian Krebs.

The pizza in the photo looks like it deserves a bad review, but setting that aside, here is yet another example of Yelp reviews being used as a form of extortion. Click on the photo to get the complete article.

Picture a typical fight on the playground at an elementary school. One child gets mad at another because she lost at tetherball, so she screams, “I don’t like you and nobody else does either!” It’s not hurtful enough for the girl to say that she doesn’t like the other girl, she seeks to add credibility to her argument by speaking for the rest of humanity.

Some people never grow up. I get calls from potential clients, needing me to defend them against a defamation action for a review they posted on Yelp. A call I received today illustrates why these people find themselves being sued for defamation. Changing the facts to protect the confidentiality of the client, here is what happened:

The caller hired a contractor to add a room to her home. The contractor did his thing, but the caller wasn’t happy with the result. She then paid another contractor to come in and do the work the way she thought it should have been done. Then she sat down at her computer to tell the world via a Yelp review what she thought about the first contractor.

She wrote about her experience with the contractor, and why she was unhappy with the work he did. So far so good. I would defend to the death her right to post that review.

But like the girl on the school yard, a dry dissertation of the problems is just not stinging enough. Someone might still do business with this contractor, and she owes the world a duty to make sure that the no good, son-of-a-gun never gets another job. Continue reading →

I get many calls from victims of Internet defamation who want me to go to court and get an order to stop the defamation. In other words, they want a court order that stops someone from speaking or publishing statements that the victims deems to be defamatory. Is that possible?

Like most legal questions, the answer is, “it depends.”

California law is very clear that after a trial has determined that the statements being made are defamatory, the court can order the defendant to stop making those statements. The reason is that defamatory speech is not protected, so once it has been found to be defamatory, the court can order the defendant not to repeat the defamatory statements. Once the court has issued such an order, it can be enforced just like any other court order, with the court assessing sanctions and even jail time if the defendant refuses to comply.

The much tougher challenge is getting a court to order a defendant to stop defaming the victim before there has been a trial. Typically, it takes at least a year to take a matter to trial, and that may be far too long for the victim. A temporary injunction can be obtained in a matter of days, so that affords a much faster remedy if it is available.

But there is a problem. An injunction is usually issued with little or no time for the defendant to oppose it. The procedure is that the plaintiff files an ex parte application with just 24 hours notice to the other side. The plaintiff’s attorney may have taken weeks to prepare a carefully crafted application supported by any number of declarations from witnesses, but the defendant gets just 24 hours to put together an opposition. Indeed, it’s far worse, because notice must be given 24 hours in advance, but the application may not be served until just four hours before the hearing, depending on the procedure followed by a particular court. If good cause can be shown, the ex parte application can be sought with no notice to the other side. A defendant could be ordered to stop speaking before the judge has ever heard his side of the story. Is that fair? Continue reading →

I don’t receive these calls very often, but they are heart wrenching when I do. I have received multiple calls over the years arising from television portrayals of deceased people. They typically arise from those “true detective” shows. An unsolved case is discussed, and the family of the prime suspect elects to point the finger at someone close to the case who has since died. A dead person is the perfect scapegoat, because he can’t defend himself.

As you can imagine, having the loving memory of a former, spouse, sibling and/or parent sullied by a false accusation of murder does not sit well with those involved. Their love-one is being defamed, and they call wanting to sue for defamation.

But consider the very basis of defamation. The damage that defamation causes is the loss of reputation AND the emotional distress that flows therefrom. We’ve all been taught not to speak ill of the dead, and no doubt it causes tremendous heartache for the family of the deceased when lies are told about him, but he isn’t here to suffer. This is why the law provides that you can’t defame the dead.

When I present this bad news to callers, inevitably it is followed up with the classic quantum of harm argument. Potential clients always look first to the harm that is being caused, and assume there must be a remedy.

“But these claims are destroying my life because now everyone thinks my deceased husband was a murderer. There must be something we can do.”

I understand this logic, and indeed it is seemingly embraced by the most fundamental of all legal maxims, “equity will not suffer a wrong to be without a remedy.”

The problem is the definition of “wrong”. If the law says that you can’t defame the dead, then the fact that you speak poorly of the dead does not make your speech defamatory, and you have thus committed no “wrong” in a legal sense. Thus, the fact that you are doing something that causes emotional distress to others does not mean that there is a basis for a legal action. Some vegans are no doubt very upset that there is so much meat being eaten around them, but they can’t sue because meat-eating is not a legal wrong. The harm suffered does not necessarily determine whether a wrong was committed.

Go here for a very interesting discussion of defaming the dead, with many historical examples.

In this case, we represented a business and the individual who owns that business. The defendant, a medical doctor named Pankaj Karan, was starting his own business, MDTelexchange, and traveled to an overseas company also owned by our client (we’ll call that the “foreign company”) and entered into a contract for the creation of some custom call center software.

And that is where the divergence in the two versions of the story begins. Our clients asserted (and proved at trial) that the working software was delivered on time by the foreign company. The defendant, Dr. Karan, claimed otherwise, and blamed the failure of his start-up company on the software.

Dr. Karan’s claims never made sense, because while the software would have been useful in his business, it was in no way essential. Blaming the software for the failure of the business was akin to saying a business failed due to a lack of business cards. But for whatever reason, Dr. Karan chose to blame our clients, and in an email announced that he was going to “work night and day to inflict the maximum amount of financial pain that is allowed under the law.” To that end, he ignored the fact that his contract was with the foreign company, and instead attacked our client personally, along with his other company, taking to the Internet to trash their reputations.

This is a scenario that I see over and over in defamation cases. Someone becomes unhappy with a business or individual, and decides to criticize them on-line. It might even begin with a laudable motive – just putting out the word to the public to avoid a business that did not satisfy the critic. I will vigorously defend the right of anyone to go on line and publish a legitimate criticism of a business.

But something happens that takes the person beyond a legitimate review. As the person types the words, he or she decides it’s just not stinging enough and won’t cause enough harm. In this case, Dr. Karan must have felt that a legitimate review of the foreign company, stating that in his opinion the software did not work as promised or was not delivered on time, just wasn’t hurtful enough. He posted two articles on his own blog, and sent an email to our clients’ customers. In the email and postings, Dr. Karan’s comments had almost nothing to do with the alleged problems with the software. Indeed, he abandoned his claim that the software was late, and instead claimed that it had never been delivered at all. He added that our client had cheated an employer ten years earlier, and that his company had failed to pay vendors hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although our clients had never received a single complaint from a customer, Dr. Karan claimed that “they are swindlers of the highest kind and have milked many of their clients of money and time.”

At trial, Dr. Karan could not identify a single customer that our clients had “swindled”, he could not identify a single vendor they had failed to pay, could not specify how he had cheated his former employer, and acknowledged that the software was in fact delivered. Today, an Orange County jury, known for being very conservative with damage awards, awarded $1.5 million jointly and individually to both of our clients for the damage to their reputations and business, caused by Dr. Karan.

In a standard civil action, the plaintiff has the burden to prove the case. This is true in a defamation action as well, but since truth is a defense to defamation, the burden of proving a statement is true falls on the defendant. I can’t fathom how defendant thought he would get away with what he published in this email and on his blog, but I think he may have thought he would be safe because we could not prove a negative. In other words, how do you show that you have never defrauded any of your customers? Bring in every customer you have ever worked with to testify that you did not defraud them? That would be impossible, and that is why the law puts the burden on defendant to prove the TRUTH of the statements. Dr. Karan could not prove his statements were true, and was therefore liable for Internet defamation.

Pankaj Karan was admirably represented at various times during the action by Randolph Catanese and Douglas Hume from Catanese & Wells, David R. Calderon from Barth, Berus & Calderon, and Palak Chopra from the Law Offices of Palak Chopra.

[UPDATE — January 2, 2014] Dr. Karan did not go silently into the good night. His attorneys appealed the $1.5 million verdict, claiming there was insufficient evidence to support an award of that size. To that claim, and in denying the appeal, the court opened its opinion with the sentence, “All things considered, appellant Dr. Pankaj Karan got off cheaply in the trial court.” Better yet, in commenting on our brief, the court stated:

[Dr. Karan] has misstated the record in numerous particulars, as shown in a respondents’ brief so devastating it has left Karan, like Job, with no reply but silence and a hand over his mouth.

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